MoMA’s Paola Antonelli on the groundbreaking designs that have changed humanity

Paola Antonelli has a litmus test for worthy design. People often ask the Museum of Modern Art’s senior curator of architecture and design how she decides what to add to the museum’s collection, and she gives them simple instructions: “Close your eyes and think, If this object did not exist, would the world miss out?” she says.

Of course, filling one of the world’s preeminent art museums is not quite that easy. Antontelli says you also have to consider an object’s form, function, and problem-solving utility—but her litmus test is something she returns to again and again. “It doesn’t mean that something has to be necessary,” Antonelli clarifies. Take, for example, the Tamagotchi. “Totally superfluous,” she says. “[But] I think it would be a pity that it didn’t exist, right?”

Antonelli is telling me this at a preview of MoMA’s newest exhibition, Pirouette: Turning Points in Design, which opened on a snowy New York City Sunday. The show examines design objects as change agents that have had a deep impact on society, as far ranging as the humble Post-it note, first Apple desktop computer, and a portable handwashing station developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design changes human behavior, Antonelli contends, and this exhibition proves her case in dozens of design inventions. “Objects have consequences,” she says. “That’s really, in a way, the motto for the exhibition.”

This isn’t the first time Antonelli has examined the social impact of designers and the objects they introduce to society. She launched the content series Design Emergency with Alice Rawsthorn in 2020 to examine the many ways design solves problems in moments of crisis. The series later became a book. “Designers are trained to traditionally and classically solve problems,” Antonelli told me in 2020. “Design is a word that is as big as art or culture,” she added. “So it’s difficult to say what design can do in a particular situation. But it definitely is a lot more than just chairs and posters.”

Pirouette encompasses, yes, chairs (the Eames’s RAR rocking armchair; the Monobloc chair; the Aeron office chair, to name a few) and posters (okay, let’s say signs: a parking sign; a route sign for British roadways) but also a wide range of objects pulled mostly from MoMA’s collection spanning furniture, electronics, symbols, fashion, wearables, industrial design, product design, and information design from the 1930s to the present.

The I love New York concept sketch, NASA worm logo, Tabi boots, Crocs, a Telfar bag, a Bic pen, an infographic depicting Brazil’s deforestation rates: What these objects have in common is their invention. They changed the way people thought, saw, or interacted with the world. “They all represent experiments with new materials, technologies and concepts, and offer unconventional solutions to conventional problems,” reads part of the exhibition’s opening text. “In these objects, designers have channeled their vision and ingenuity, distilling energy into momentum and setting them in motion like ballet dancers performing pirouettes.”

I asked Antonelli how she curated an exhibition with such a range of seemingly unrelated objects. “In some cases, it’s very free-flowing. It’s almost like word association,” she says. “In others, it’s really juxtaposition”—and putting objects into conversation with each other. 

I pointed out how she had situated a pair of Crocs, Tabis, a Telfar bag, and a plastic Monobloc chair near each other in one corner of the exhibition. “The Telfar bag is there, and the conversation that it’s having really directly, in my opinion, is with the Margiela Tabis. But also it’s having a conversation with the Crocs next to it because Telfar’s motto is ‘This is not for you, it’s for everyone.’ So there’s also this idea of making things for everybody.” 

Antonelli then connects the Crocs and Monobloc chair. “They’re so ambiguous,” she says. “[They’re] amazing mass products enjoyed by billions of people.” But they also have this flip side. The Monoblock chair “has become almost synonymous with waste and with consumerism,” she says. Meanwhile, Crocs are at the center of an eternal discussion that gives the design tension: “Are the Crocs beautiful? Are they ugly?” 

“There are all these different associations that somebody like you, who’s conversant in design might catch,” she says. “Others who are less erudite, because everybody knows design, will catch them anyway, but at a different level. And maybe they will not catch them at all, but they will focus on every single object.”

Each object, Antonelli says—whether M&Ms candies, a Moka Express, Sony Walkman, or Bernadette Thompson’s “money manicure” artificial nails—shifted the way we operate in the world. Some designs are so intuitive and intrinsic to our day-to-day lives as to be imperceptible, like the flat-bottomed paper bag. Other objects are more subtle and esoteric, like Sabine Marcelis’s resin “Candy Cube,” which might have an effect on other designers and percolate into society that way. As she said of information design in 2020: “Our actions don’t have reactions in a very unequivocal way, but rather have reverberations that can go in many directions.”

The exhibition text warns that “objects have the power to shift the ways we behave, for good and for bad.” The objects in this exhibition exemplify human ingenuity, providing new answers to previously unsolved challenges that you can see with your own eyes. Some of those solutions, like the injection-molded plastic Monobloc chair invented in the 1950s—a quintessential mass-market product that provides people around the world an easy to clean and cheap place to sit—have consequences that aren’t so black and white as good and bad.

“It’s always time to make people understand how important design is,” Antonelli says. “But right now, I would love people to have something constructive to think about. Design is a lens to look at the world in a constructive way. It’s a beautiful expression of human creativity, positively directed, in the case of the objects that are in this exhibition, at least.”